Stranger Child Page 8

  Emma leaped out of bed and rushed to fetch Ollie. He could sleep in their bed tonight. She wanted her family together, in one room.

  When David had woken up this morning and found Ollie with them, he had accused her of being ridiculous.

  ‘You’re neurotic – do you know that? I appreciate she’s not your child, but she’s mine and I love her. All I ask is that you respect that and don’t treat her like some alien in our midst. So what if she came into our room. When Ollie’s thirteen, will you be frightened if he wanders into our room in the middle of the night for something? No, I thought not. You’d assume he’d had a bad dream, or wasn’t feeling well. Did you even ask?’

  Emma felt a rush of guilt. But it hadn’t been like that. Natasha had advanced into the room. But how could she explain? David didn’t give her the chance.

  ‘Keep an eye on her for me today, Emma. I don’t want to lose her again. And don’t drive her away.’

  What did he think she was going to do – throw Tasha out while he was at work? But some of what he said rang disturbingly true. Perhaps she was being neurotic. Perhaps she did resent the girl for upsetting her peaceful life.

  She groaned and rubbed her tired eyes. Ollie was silently watching her from his high chair. She didn’t think he had ever seen her sad until this week.

  Emma heard footsteps on the oak boards in the hall and quickly rearranged her expression into a neutral one. In the reflection from the window she saw the kitchen door opening. Natasha stepped into the room and just stood there. Emma could only think how difficult it must be for this poor child to walk into a room in a house that didn’t yet feel like her home.

  ‘Morning, Tasha,’ Emma said, forcing a happy tone into her voice, busying herself with Ollie so that she didn’t have to look at her stepdaughter.

  ‘Where’s …’ It was clear to Emma that Natasha didn’t know what to say. She had yet to bring herself to call David ‘Dad’ and although she could see it hurt him, he’d told her she could call him David if she was more comfortable with that. It seemed, though, that this had left her not knowing what to call him.

  ‘Where’s your dad?’ Emma supplied helpfully. ‘He thought it was time he went back to work. He came to tell you this morning, but you were fast asleep and he didn’t want to disturb you. He’s only going to work until lunch, though. He’ll be home in a couple of hours to eat with us. Is there anything you’d like to do this morning?’

  Emma finally looked properly at Natasha, who shook her head.

  ‘Right – breakfast. Do you want to make the toast, or help Ollie with his yoghurt? He likes to use his spoon, but most of it goes all over his face.’

  Ollie was beaming at Natasha. ‘Ay, Tassa,’ he shouted and laughed, pointing his spoon at her.

  Emma watched Natasha’s face closely. She stared at Ollie and for a moment her customary frown smoothed out. But then it was as if she pulled herself together and with a determined walk she went over to the bread bin and slotted two slices of granary loaf into the toaster, her back to a disappointed Ollie. It was clear that Ollie had taken to his sister, despite the fact that she was ignoring him and was watching the toaster as though it could offer more interest than anything or anybody else in the room.

  Emma fed Ollie the last of his yoghurt, wiped his face, and put him on the floor. He set off at a fast crawl, straight to Natasha. He grabbed her leg and started to pull himself up. He was so close to walking now.

  Emma watched carefully. She saw Natasha glance down and smile fleetingly before munching on the toast, her back still to the room.

  ‘Tassa,’ Ollie said, pulling on the girl’s jeans and looking up at her. He wrapped his arms round her leg and put his face against her calf. ‘Ahhh,’ he said, as if she was hurt and he was hugging her better.

  What can Ollie see that I can’t? Emma wondered. Have I been too hard on the girl? She saw Tasha look down again with an expression she couldn’t read. Then she saw the girl close her eyes and give a tiny shake of the head before she turned back to her toast, ignoring her little brother.

  ‘Come on, Ollie, let’s get that nappy changed and get you dressed,’ Emma said, scooping Ollie off the floor and ignoring his disgruntled shout. ‘Do you want to come, Tasha? He puts up quite a fight.’

  Natasha didn’t turn round, but Emma could see her head shaking.

  She felt sorely tempted to say to her, ‘Can you answer me, please,’ if only to take a small chunk out of the barrier that the child had erected, but she knew David would be furious. She didn’t know whether her irritation was natural, or whether it was because she was only the girl’s stepmother. Perhaps if Tasha was her own child she would feel differently about this rudeness.

  ‘Help yourself to more toast, then, if you’re not coming with us. We’ll only be ten minutes.’ Emma could hear the false jovial tones in her voice and knew with every bit of common sense that she possessed that this was wrong. She should just be herself.

  She pulled the door closed behind her, but not before she had seen Natasha watching her, her thin body tense, her eyes flicking nervously between Emma and the clock on the wall. Was this a sign that she was anxious for David to be home? Or was she working out how long they had to be alone? Emma felt a cold prickling down her spine.

  ‘Mummy’s being ridiculous,’ she whispered to Ollie as she carried him out of the room.

  *

  Natasha stood in the kitchen, listening to Emma’s soft footfalls as she walked upstairs. She could hear her singing quietly to Ollie as he shouted encouragement.

  She hadn’t missed the look that Emma had given her as she had gone out of the door and hoped her own face hadn’t given too much away.

  She glanced out of the window. This had worked out better than she thought. Was it time yet?

  Natasha was nervous. It had all seemed so simple, but suddenly it didn’t any longer. Suddenly it felt huge, as if a massive truck was hurtling towards her and she couldn’t get out of the way.

  She had been so confident, so sure she could do this. But now?

  Then she thought of why: why she had believed it would be easy; why it was the right thing. And she thought of the alternative. Her nerves calmed a little.

  She looked at the clock again.

  Tasha knew Emma was perfectly capable of changing Ollie’s nappy in a matter of minutes, but as he had just finished breakfast and was still in his pyjamas, there would be the battle of getting him dressed. She also suspected Emma might take as long as possible to avoid having to spend too much time down here. With her.

  That was good, wasn’t it? It was much better if Emma hated her.

  Was the time right?

  She tiptoed over to the door and pulled it ajar slightly. From upstairs she could hear Ollie’s shouts of protest, and Emma’s gentle laugh. Somehow Natasha knew that Emma would be tickling her son’s tummy.

  She closed the door quietly and checked the clock for the final time.

  Her arms stiff by her sides, she clenched her fists.

  ‘You can do this,’ she muttered. ‘You can do this.’

  17

  Since the appeal had gone live for information about the young girl whose body had been found in the woods, Becky and her team had been inundated with calls from people who claimed some girl they knew hadn’t been seen for a few days. Despite the level of detail about age, ethnicity and hair colour, further investigation almost always revealed that the child they were referring to was black, or seventeen – or in one case was even a boy. Unfortunately, if a child really was missing it had to be checked out – not to help solve this case, but because another child might be at risk. Inevitably, the vast majority of calls turned into a wild goose chase.

  ‘It’s not a bloody game,’ Becky muttered, to nobody in particular. The trouble was that they couldn’t issue a photo – it would be too disturbing. They were hoping to get the DNA results for Amy Davidson back soon – even if only to rule her out – but this list of possible candidates was sadly g
rowing longer with each call they received.

  The one thing they had been able to do, though, was circulate photos of Natasha Joseph around the local forces, in case she had appeared on anybody’s radar. They still needed to know what had happened to her, and where she had been. For once, it seemed there was some news.

  ‘I think we’ve got a real lead this time.’ Nic Havers was waving a piece of paper at Becky, looking pleased with himself. ‘Have you got a moment?

  ‘Course I have.’ Since joining CID, Nic had a perpetual smile on his face, and to Becky he looked like an overgrown puppy with the most enormous feet and the eager face of a child at Christmas.

  ‘I’ve been speaking to British Transport Police,’ Nic said. ‘They think they have Natasha on camera. In fact, they’ve been looking for her, waiting until the next time she steps on one of their trains to keep an eye on her – possibly arrest her.’

  Becky looked surprised.

  ‘What do they think she’s done?’

  ‘They want to come in and talk to us about it.’

  ‘Well done, Nic. I’ll give DCI Douglas a call to see if he wants to join us. When are they coming?’

  ‘Now, apparently.’

  Becky raised her eyebrows in surprise and reached for the phone.

  *

  As she waited for Tom and British Transport Police to arrive, Becky walked across the incident room to have a word with Charley.

  ‘Now you’ve had a bit of time to think about it, what’s your take on Natasha, Charley?’

  The young detective chewed her bottom lip and gave a small shake of the head.

  ‘I think she’s confused. She probably felt secure with the people she’s been living with. However they treated her, that’s what she now considers to be the norm. My guess is that she would prefer right now to be back where she understands the rules.’

  ‘You mean she could be suffering from a kind of Stockholm syndrome – you know, a younger version of Patty Hearst?’ Becky asked. ‘I’m not old enough to have been around at the time, but Hearst was kidnapped in her late teens. Within a few weeks of her abduction she joined her kidnappers and even took part in a bank raid with them. So if just weeks of mind control, imprisonment and abuse made a nineteen-year-old feel she belonged with her captors, what impact could six years of that life have on a child as young as Tasha?’

  Charley’s look of revulsion at the idea didn’t escape Becky. She clearly had a lot to learn. Expect the worst and be surprised if it’s not as bad as you think was Becky’s motto. That way people ceased to have the ability to shock and appal you.

  Becky’s thoughts were interrupted as the door to the incident room opened and two men in British Transport Police uniform entered. Both well over six feet tall; one of them had shoulders like an American footballer and a face to match, with a squashed nose and a wide forehead. Becky didn’t think she would like to argue with him about non-payment of her train fare.

  Tom Douglas was right behind them, and she walked across to meet her visitors.

  Once the formalities had been completed, the big burly policeman, who had introduced himself as PC Mark Heywood, asked if he could use Becky’s computer to access the CCTV footage he had uploaded. It took no more than a few seconds for Heywood to pull up a grainy picture. He clicked the play icon.

  The sequence lasted a few seconds.

  Tasha, Becky thought. A young girl with fair hair wearing a dark duffle coat was walking through the train. A dark-haired lad who looked to be in his mid-teens was walking towards her and stood to one side to let her pass. She glanced at him with a half smile, but didn’t speak and walked on, out of shot.

  ‘Is that your girl?’ Heywood asked Becky.

  ‘Yes. I’m as certain as I can be from this video that the girl is Natasha Joseph. But why have you got this footage?’

  ‘We’d been alerted to something going on on routes to the north of the city, so we pulled in the CCTV from the trains for the relevant period. That’s where we found your girl.’

  ‘When was this, and what’s she done?’ Tom asked.

  ‘She boarded a train to Leeds at Manchester Victoria a couple of weeks ago. She got off at Boswell Bridge – we can show you that.’ He clicked again. It was a view of a small, provincial-looking station. Natasha was standing on the platform talking to a slightly older lad and she pulled off her backpack and put it down on the bench. A few minutes later she walked away and the boy picked up the backpack, disappearing in the opposite direction.

  Becky knew exactly what this was and didn’t really need to ask.

  ‘Drugs?’ she said.

  The policeman slowly nodded his head.

  18

  When she was pregnant Emma hadn’t wanted to know whether she was having a boy or a girl, so had decorated Ollie’s nursery in a pale sage green and bought a wonderful huge tree stencil to paint in white on one wall. It was a warm and cosy room, and Emma was loath to leave it and venture back into the chilly atmosphere downstairs.

  The addition of a window seat in the room had been inspired, and she spent a lot of time sitting there with Ollie, pointing out the birds, the trees and the occasional aeroplane, but her favourite chair was the wingback recliner that she had bought for when she was feeding Ollie in the middle of the night. It was so comfortable that she had often pulled a throw over herself after feeding him and had fallen asleep there.

  Hiding up here was ridiculous, though.

  ‘Come on, little man, we’re all done.’ Emma pulled Ollie’s last sock on and gazed at her son for a moment. Ollie still felt a bit hot and seemed tetchy and unsettled. She had to find a way to get back to some sort of normality for her son’s sake.

  With a sigh, she picked him up and made her way downstairs, mentally rehearsing her tone of voice and how to be non-confrontational with Natasha.

  ‘Okay – I’m going to make a cake. Would you like to help?’ she said in a jolly voice as she pushed open the kitchen door.

  She smiled at Ollie. ‘Are you going to help your sister and me make a cake, Ollie?’

  Emma walked towards the table, expecting to see Natasha sitting there, eating her breakfast. She looked over her shoulder to the other end of the room.

  She stopped dead and turned round. The kitchen was empty.

  Natasha had gone.

  *

  ‘Oh God, where is she?’ Emma whispered to herself, trying to hide her anxiety from Ollie, who was resting on one hip as Emma made a tour of the downstairs rooms.

  ‘She must be upstairs. Must have gone up while I was dressing you, Ollie.’ Emma tried to rush up the stairs, but carting Ollie’s eleven kilos around was beginning to take its toll.

  She pushed open the door to Natasha’s room. ‘Tasha,’ she shouted, her breath catching. ‘Are you there, love?’

  No answer. But on Natasha’s past performance that meant nothing, so she was going to have to look. She dashed around all the upstairs rooms – even checking her and David’s en suite bathroom and walk-in wardrobe. There wasn’t a sign.

  ‘Where are you, Natasha,’ she muttered, taking the stairs down as quickly as she could without putting Ollie at risk.

  She checked the places she hadn’t thought to look in downstairs – the cloakroom and even the understairs cupboard. But Natasha wasn’t here. She wasn’t in the house.

  ‘Shit,’ she muttered, glancing worriedly at Ollie. But he was too bewildered by all the rushing around to pick up on anything she said. Poor baby.

  She hurried into the kitchen and looked out at the garden. It was empty of all but the builders’ rubble.

  Grasping the handle to the back door, she jerked the buggy from the porch into the kitchen and pushed Ollie into it.

  ‘We’re going to have to go and look for her, sweetheart. Okay?’

  ‘Kay,’ Ollie smiled. He didn’t know what was going on, but he sensed excitement of some sort.

  Leaving him where he was, Emma went into the back porch to grab her red fleece. It was
n’t there.

  ‘What the hell have I done with it?’ she said. She grabbed David’s dark-grey gardening fleece with the paint stains and holes in, and a blanket to put over Ollie. Shoving her feet into a pair of wellingtons, she went back into the kitchen and tucked the blanket around her son.

  ‘Stay under there, poppet. We’re not going to be out for long.’

  Kicking the door wide with the heel of her left foot, she manoeuvred Ollie through the porch and down the back steps.

  Running as fast as she could, she made her way along the side path by the impenetrable high hedge that bordered a narrow track into the fields beyond. They were halfway along the path when she heard a voice from the far side of the hedge. She heard four words.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  She stopped to listen. It was Tasha’s voice. She desperately wanted to hear what else was said, but Ollie heard the voice too.

  ‘Ay, ay, Tassa,’ he called at the top of his little voice.

  The talking stopped, and Emma started to run. She wanted to know who the hell was with Tasha. She raced along the path, Ollie bumping up and down in his buggy. But as she reached the side gate, Natasha came into view wearing Emma’s fleece, her face red, her eyes shining – but whether from anger or unshed tears, Emma couldn’t tell.

  ‘Who were you talking to, Natasha?’ she asked, trying to keep her tone as level as possible.

  ‘What?’ Natasha answered rudely, avoiding Emma’s eyes. ‘You must be hearing things.’

  Emma left Ollie in his buggy and walked towards Natasha, aiming to get past her to check for herself. But Natasha leaned back against the gate, both elbows resting nonchalantly on the top.

  ‘Move,’ Emma said. Natasha’s mouth settled into a hard line and she shook her head.

  ‘Move, Natasha,’ Emma repeated. The girl stared defiantly back at her.

  Pushing Ollie to one side, where she could keep him in view, Emma ran along the path at the front of the house, down the drive and through the gate, never letting Ollie out of her sight. By the time she was in the lane, it was empty. There was nobody there.